Tyndale's English translation of Erasmus' "Enchiridion" (1576)

Enchiridion militis Christiani, which may be called in English, the hansome weapon of a Christian knight: replenished with many goodly preceptes: made by the famous clerke Erasmus of Roterdame, and newly corrected and imprinted.

Imprinted at London: in Fleet-streete, by William How, for Abraham Veale, 1576

Octavo: 352 pp. Collation: A-B⁸ C⁴ D-Y⁸ Z⁴.

EIGHTH EDITION (first ed. 1533) of Erasmus' "Enchiridion" in English. 19th-century calf, rebacked. Minor, expert repairs to title. The text is in very good condition. A few 16th-century annotations in English.

It seems natural that the 'Enchiridion' should have been the first of Erasmus' works known to have been translated into English. A version was made by William Tyndale in 1522 or 1523 when he was tutor in the household of Sir John Walsh at Little Sodbury in Gloucestershire. While it has been argued that Tyndale's text was lost, it is almost certain that the translation published by John Byddell on 15 November 1533 was Tyndale's (For the problem of attribution see John Foxe, 'Acts and Monuments' and also J.A. Gee's 'Tyndale and the 1533 Enchiridion', PMLA #49). The style of the Byddell edition strongly impies Tyndale… and Byddell's role as a client of Cromwell and a publisher of reformation literature supports the attribution."(Devereaux)

"The 'Enchiridion' was completed at Louvain in 1502 and was published with several other pieces in February 1503 by Martens. In December 1504 Erasmus sent the entire 'Lucubratiunculae' to John Colet with an illuminating personal estimation: 'The 'Enchiridion' I composed not in order to show off my cleverness or style, but solely in order to counteract the error of those who make religion in general consist in rituals and observances of an almost more than Jewish formality, but who are astonishingly indifferent to matters that have to do with true goodness. What I have tried to do, in fact, is to teach a method of morals, as it were, in the manner of those who have originated fixed procedures in the various branches of learning'. In this same letter to Colet Erasmus mentions the work on Paul's epistles to the Romans that had occupied him for many years and his discovery of the wellsprings of the science of theology in Origen. Much later, in his famous letter to Dorp in defense of the 'Moria', Erasmus reiterates this estimate of his work: 'In the 'Enchiridion' I laid down quite simply the pattern of a Christian life'. (Ep 337:94-5)" (O'Malley, Erasmus: Collected Works, Vol. 66)